Jun 04 2017

Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold

Reading as a Hugo voter is a funny thing. I’ve been aware of the Hugo awards for more than 30 years now, some of the winners have been among the best things that I’ve read, and I’m thrilled to be a part of the process for the first time this year. I’m getting to play a small part in giving this award that has meant a lot to me, isn’t that neat? I’m full of squee, as the saying goes.

Still, reading for the award changes my reading process. (Writing about books so regularly here has also changed how I read, somewhat, but that’s another story.) No matter how deeply I have sunk into the reading experience, evaluation is lurking somewhere in the background of my mind. How does this work stack up against the other five finalists? Above or below the baseline established by the first finalist I read in this particular category? Is it doing something that’s been done many times before? Is it trying something new, or at least something that appears new to me? How does it stack up?

Penric and the Shaman is the second story of Penric, a young scholar and divine, and his much older demon, and I would not have read it just now if it had not been nominated for a Hugo in the category of Best Novella. I would definitely have started with the first story in the series, because I am like that, although Bujold provides enough background that the story is perfectly understandable without having read the other one first.

Penric’s world is a fairly standard fantasy setting: vaguely medieval technology, a feudal system of government not terribly unlike England’s, a European geography of temperate climes and numerous small polities. The dominant religion centers on five deities, who are demonstrably real and accessible to people in this world, including Penric himself on at least one occasion that he recalls. Spirits and demons are also present, if not necessarily in abundance. Penric’s demon, Desdemona, is a presence inside of him, separate, given to promoting chaos, and possessing certain magical abilities. Penric himself is in his early 20s, but has advanced quickly in training as both a sorcerer and a divine thanks to Desdemona’s presence.

Bujold tells the stories of Penric and the Shaman from three different points of view. The novella opens with Inglis wondering whether the nearby vultures will feast on him. He is stuck on an icy slope, pinned by rocks after a fall. A dog seems to appear, Inglis hears voices, and he cannot tell whether this is real or vision by the time consciousness slips away. In the next section, Penric is immersed in a translation, which Desdemona finds frightfully dull, when his patron and liege lady calls him in for consultations. A Senior Locator from the capital has come to their remote home in search of a young nobleman who has fled before an accusation of murder, an accusation, in this instance, with occult overtones. Oswyl, the Locator, provides the third point of view in subsequent chapters.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/04/penric-and-the-shaman-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/

Jun 04 2017

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona

OMG, this book made me SO HAPPY. I’ll freely admit that I avoided reading it because I didn’t enjoy G Willow Wilson’s Alif The Unseen, and I wasn’t interested in being disappointed once more by well-meaning reviews who give questionable issues a pass because diversity. But Ms Marvel Vol I was so terrific that I immediately ran out and bought every one of the series’ digital trades because a) I wanted to own them, b) I wanted the creators to have some well-deserved profit, or at the very least signal to Marvel that this is the kind of work they should continue paying awesome creators like these for, and c) because the Kindle sale for trades and graphic novels is SO GOOD right now.

Anyway, Kamala Khan is your average conservatively-raised teenage girl who gets hit by Terrigan mist and becomes, for lack of a better term, a shapeshifter. At first, she wants to be like her hero, Captain Marvel, but as she becomes more comfortable with her powers and herself, she develops confidence in being someone unique. It’s the very awesome, super-powered beginning of a coming-of-age story that’s pretty hard not to find relateable. I love the depiction of her home life, normalizing her upbringing in the way that other ethnic minorities’ have been in other media (Puerto Ricans in West Side Story, Italians in Saturday Night Fever, just to name a few examples.) The slices of life never seem touristy or “exotic”, just different and a normal part of the great American melting pot. G Willow Wilson has done a terrific job writing this, and oh my God, the art! I loved Adrian Alphona’s work on Runaways, and he’s just gotten better and better (tho I do admit to being more fond of the more clearly/heavily inked art of Runaways.)

I’m so very much looking forward to reading the rest of the series. You should really check out the rest of the Amazon sale (search for “Marvel graphic novels”, which is a misnomer but whatever) and snag these on the cheap while you can.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/04/ms-marvel-vol-1-no-normal-by-g-willow-wilson-adrian-alphona/

May 31 2017

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale

I totally judged this book by its cover.

First of all, the book is by Catherine Merridale. About a decade ago, I picked up a copy of Ivan’s War and was rewarded with one of the most amazing works of history that I have ever read. It’s a chronicle of the Great Patriotic War as seen by the ordinary soldiers who served in it. There’s a certain amount of documentary work behind the book, but mostly it is based on interviews conducted by Merridale and a small team of historians who worked with her. Ivan’s War would have been flat-out impossible before the fall of the Soviet Union, of course, and maybe impossible again now for both demographic and political reasons. Yet Merridale and her colleagues got these men to open up about their service, their lives before and after, what they experienced, what they expected of their society afterward, and how that went. It is a brutal, brutal book because of its subject matter (the Red Army inflicted three-quarters of the casualties suffered by the Nazi war machine), best summed up by one veteran’s three-sentence description of the war. “They called us. They trained us. They killed us.” At the same time, though, it’s full of life — survivor bias at play — as these men recalled a time that was central in their individual lives and to the collective life of their now-former nation. I remember that the Ivans loved their Lend-Lease Studebakers, and many of them held on to a positive view of America despite the Cold War. Ivan’s War was so good that I will buy a new book by Merridale as soon as I see it.

Second of all, the cover of Lenin on the Train — and here I am talking about the UK hardback — is awesome. Oh, for a world where book ads are hung in multi-story size on downtown buildings! Because this design deserves to be gigantic. It leaps straight out of the early 20th century Russian avant garde and sets both book and reader in motion. The title and author’s name form a rectangle within the borders of the form of the book, but their justification and positioning mean that they don’t sit still there on the front of the book. Like their subject matter, they are moving steadily and constantly. Behind the words, abstract strokes of red on black that, at first glance, could be the lightning of the revolution that Lenin intends to bring to Russia. Electric power was an important element of early Communist propaganda, and making that manifest on the dust jacket would tie form and content together, along with echoing the styles of art that surrounded revolutionary ferment in Russia. On closer inspection, though, the lightning strokes are parts of the wheel set of a steam locomotive. Here is one of Lenin’s trains, in red (for socialism, for the blood of war, for the power that moves both) across a background of black, steaming through Germany and around the Baltic Sea, delivering Russia’s most uncompromising revolutionary. The cover perfectly unites subject and style.

The book, happily, lives up to the cover’s promise.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/31/lenin-on-the-train-by-catherine-merridale/

May 28 2017

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

As far as fantasy novels go, this has a great setting and characters (with one exception that I’ll get to in a minute) and above all atmosphere. Essentially an alternate world take on Weimar Berlin before the fascists’ rise to power, it depicts life lived on a razor’s age, hedonism in the maw of societal destruction. As a fantastical version of Cabaret, as a paean to love beyond the typical heterosexual pairing, it’s a terrific novel.

But Jesus Christ, as a spy novel, it is godawful. I spent the last two-thirds of the novel utterly mystified by Cyril because nothing he did made a goddamn lick of sense. So basically a few years before the events of Amberlough begin, he got pulled out of the field after nearly losing his life in a Russia-like neighbor. He gets taken off of desk work, however, to try to infiltrate the fascists in the fictional stand-in for The Netherlands. It’s not really a spoiler to say that his cover is blown, but then instead of going home and licking his wounds like any other competent spy would, he turns. For no good reason, and he hates himself the entire time, and he makes a lot of shitty and incompetent choices. Not even a previous near-death experience could make such an inconsistent bungler out of the master spy we’re told he is. This is the worst spy novel I’ve ever read, and an insult to John LeCarre to have this book compared with his work.

That said, it’s a pretty good sociopolitical novel, and Ari and Cordelia are both fantastic characters. It’s a wildly original setting for a fantasy novel and I do want to know more about the people and the world. But God, not as a spy novel please.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/28/amberlough-by-lara-elena-donnelly/

May 26 2017

Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

Somewhere I had read that Maskerade was the last Discworld book featuring the Lancre witches. Worse, I believed it, so I was both a little surprised and a lot pleased to pick up Carpe Jugulum and find that they were back. Pratchett dispensed with the traditional opening — “When shall we three meet again?” — because numbers are still something of a sore point for his witches. Magrat is still a Queen, as she has been since the end of Lords and Ladies, and Agnes, a.k.a. Perdita, is of two minds about the whole witchy business.

Pratchett combines three main elements to set the machinery of Carpe Jugulum in motion. First, he has the structural problem that Granny Weatherwax has grown considerably in power since she was first introduced to readers back in Equal Rites. As Nanny Ogg noted in Maskerade, witches whose power grew unchecked tended to come to bad ends, or to just go away somewhere far from mortal ken. Granny is still very much in the danger zone in this regard. Second, the King and Queen are about to have their first child, so naturally there will be a naming ceremony. The witches are invited, but it wouldn’t be a proper story if all the invitations arrived and all the witches attended and none of them got offended and nothing went wrong, would it? Third, as the title implies, vampires show up. This particular vampiric family is looking to expand their demesne and has chosen Lancre as a tasty addition.

By way of setting up all three, Pratchett writes a scene that’s as deft and devastating as anything I can think of in Discworld to this point. Granny Weatherwax has been called to help with a birth. The midwife sent someone a-running because things were all going wrong.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/26/carpe-jugulum-by-terry-pratchett/

May 25 2017

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

“As if Cordwainer Smith had written a Warhammer novel.” That blurb sold me on Ninefox Gambit. Even so, I almost bounced off of it in the first chapter. In terms of the blurb, too much Warhammer; in terms of my taste in reading, it felt too much like simple-minded war-glorifying fiction. Boom, boom! Pew! Pew! Pew! What’s this doing as a Hugo finalist?

And then it wasn’t.

She had eaten with him at high table for years, listened to his anecdotes of service in the Drowned March and at the Featered Bridge between the two great continents of the world Makhtu. She knew that he liked to drink two sips from his own cup after the communal cup went around, and then to arrange his pickles or sesame spinach on top of his rice. She knew that he cared about putting things in their proper place. It was an understandable impulse. It was also going to get him killed.
Already she was rewriting the equations because she knew what his answer would be.
The sergeant reiterated his protest, stopping short of accusing her of heresy herself. Formation instinct should have forced him to obey her, but the fact that he considered her actions deeply un-Kel was enabling him to resist.
Cheris cut contact and sent another override. Lieutenant Verab’s acknowledgment sounded grim. Cheris marked Squadron Four outcasts, Kel no longer. (pp. 12–13)

Ninefox Gambit is set in a far future amidst a great deal of sufficiently advanced technology. Not just faster-than-light travel, sensors and communications of the sort necessary to make a fast-paced space opera work, but also weapons and effects that the characters call “exotics.” Formations that multiply the force exerted by a soldier’s weapon, other formations that provide enhanced resistance, weapons such as amputation guns or a horrible death multiplier called a threshold winnower. The exotics depend on advanced mathematics, shared indoctrination among soldiers and, crucially, control of an overarching calendar. Mastery of time, in this sense, provides mastery of matter on levels that current science would call impossible.

The price of mastery, though, is ruthlessly enforced orthodoxy. The calendar and the technologies it supports are the basis of the main polity in Ninefox Gambit, the hexarchate. Heresy is a constant threat to the integrity of the calendar, and the hexarchate ruthlessly stamps it out with their military caste, the Kel, supported by the secret service Shuos, and eventually by other castes that bring deviant thinking back into alignment.

Whether or not it’s plausible under our known laws of physics, it’s a system that is internally consistent through the book and a fine framework for telling a story. Lee chooses to tell the story of Captain Kel Cheris, the officer forced in the opening chapter to use unconventional, perhaps even heretical, methods to take an objective assigned to her by Kel Command. Her approach is noticed, for better and for worse, by high levels of the Command. They invite her to be one of seven officers to propose a means for retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, an important calendrical nexus that has fallen to heretics and threatens to infect a large swathe of the hexarchate.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/25/ninefox-gambit-by-yoon-ha-lee/

May 24 2017

Traveler of Worlds by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

The important information on this book’s cover is the subtitle, Conversations with Robert Silverberg. Traveler of Worlds is entirely a set of interviews with Silverberg, who recently passed 80 years of age. He’s one of the grand old men of science fiction; he has attended every Hugo award ceremony; he was incredibly prolific back in the day; and he is now very firmly retired.

Over the course of a little more than 300 pages, Silverberg and Zinos-Amaro range across a wide variety of subjects, but concentrate on reading, writing, science fiction, and art. In science fiction fandom Silverberg is famed as a toastmaster, held to be an exceptional raconteur, and noted for welcoming even rank newcomers to the field. In his introduction to these conversations, Gardner Dozois (another grandee of the field) says, “Silverberg has always struck me as the most urbane of all the field’s practitioners” and praises his “his effortless urbanity, sophistication, and charm.” I found him congenial, but I was not blown away; perhaps I have been fortunate in my conversational partners.

The conventional narrative of Silverberg’s career is that he started selling stories from an early age, was an enormously prolific hack through the middle or late 1960s, and then had an incredibly fertile period where his art reached an entirely new level. He retired for a time in the mid-1970s, then returned with a late period of strong work that gradually tapered off. It is safe to say that he has finished writing now; he refers to himself several times in the book as a former writer.

It’s difficult to grasp just how prolific Silverberg was for a while. He mentions having a year when he sold two million words of writing. He was routinely writing, and selling, upwards of three thousand words per day. No complete bibliography of his work exists. It is possible that one could be constructed, but he wrote not only science fiction, but quite a bit of non-fiction, and nearly anything that someone asked him to write and would pay for. He wrote under a large number of pseudonyms. He wrote erotica at a time when that could earn a visit from the FBI for indecent use of the mail; he very carefully did not lie to the G-men when they dropped by, in part because they were inept with their questions.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/24/traveler-of-worlds-by-alvaro-zinos-amaro/

May 22 2017

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

The two main characters of A Closed and Common Orbit are learning what it is to be human. That’s not quire correct in one case; maybe it would be more correct to say that each is learning what it is like to be a person, with a fairly wide definition of what “person” means. They come at it from different ends, different directions and eventually meet on common, well, maybe not common ground but perhaps the common orbit of the title.

The book is a sequel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I have not read. A paragraph prefacing Orbit says that the current timeline in the story begins during the final events of Planet. It is possible that this discussion will contain spoilers for that book. I was not lost reading Orbit, so it’s not necessary to have read the previous book to enjoy the current one.

Lovelace — called Sidra in most of the book — is a ship’s AI downloaded into a highly illegal body kit for reasons not explained in the current story. She doesn’t like it. “Twenty-nine minutes before, she’d been housed in a ship, as she was designed to be. She’d had cameras in every corner, voxes in every room. She’d exsited in a web, with eyes both within in outside. A solid sphere of unblinking perception.” She doesn’t like it in the least. “Her vision was a cone, a narrow cone fixed straight ahead, with nothing — actual nothing — beyond its edges. Gravity was no longer something that happened within her … nor did it exist in the space around her, a gentle ambient folding around the ship’s outer hull. Now it was myopic glue, something that stuck feet to the floor and legs to the seat above it.” (p. 5)

Faced with such disconcerting input, such disappointing constricting input, Lovelace comes to the logical conclusion that the kit must be malfunctioning. No, Pepper assures her, that’s what being singular in a body is like. A body kit that, if discovered, would lead to many years of imprisonment for the people who have helped her into it, and erasure for the AI housed therein.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/22/a-closed-and-common-orbit-by-becky-chambers/

May 21 2017

The Accidental Terrorist by William Shunn

How does a Mormon missionary wind up facing charges of terrorism and conspiracy? In Canada, of all places?

William Shunn’s memoir, The Accidental Terrorist, starts with him at nineteen answering questions for a detective. It’s hard to tell if he’s more disconcerted by the charges he faces or the woman facing him in a short, short skirt. “I haven’t been alone so close to a woman in five months. With no table between us, our knees nearly touch. This is against mission rules in so many ways, I can’t even count.”

Even then, with the full force of the law about to descend on him, he is still worried about the missionary rules under which he was sent from Utah to Canada in 1986 to try to win converts. It’s a familiar feeling, that the rules of a foreign culture aren’t as real as one’s own. The all-encompassing nature of the Mormon culture from which Shunn came, its many rules, and its many means for enforcing them that have nothing to do with the larger cultures outside of Mormonism no doubt contributed to Shunn’s feelings. Nevertheless, Canada’s law enforcement has arrested this upstanding young man. “Elder Shunn, tell me,” says the detective. “Tell me how you ended up here.”

Shunn tells readers the story of how he wound up on the wrong side of the Mounties, weaving his own history together with the history of Mormonism, particularly its founder Joseph Smith. The history illuminates the current setup of Mormonism, how and why they send missionaries, how the culture of the church works and works on its members, and the personal relationships members build with the church’s founders. These relationships with the church’s founding stories in turn play roles in how members relate to authority, and how people with authority in the church use it on their charges.

The book is fast and fun to read. Shunn is a breezy raconteur, recounting his story and the Mormon story with equal deftness. Dipping back into the book to write this, it’s easy to get drawn back in, flipping through the pages and following young Shunn’s efforts to win souls, hang onto his girlfriend back home, and navigate the small-bore perils of missionary life. There’s plenty that’s funny, from the terminology — assistant to the president (a local Mormon functionary) are known to the missionaries as APs, or apes — to the pranks the missionaries play on each other, to just tales of people being people in all their random, weird glory.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/21/the-accidental-terrorist-by-william-shunn/

May 20 2017

“The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon

“The Tomato Thief” by Urusla Vernon will have my first-place vote for this year’s Hugo award in the category of best novelette. It is a sideways return to the world of “Jackalope Wives,” which won the Nebula in 2014 for best short story, and is the only other story of hers that I have read.

Both are set in what feels like a mythologized version of the American Southwest. The timing is vague; this story features trains, and they have been around for a while. But people also mostly get around by foot or by animal transport. If this is the modern world, it is very distant for one reason or another.

It’s very tightly focused, mostly on Grandma Harken.

Grandma Harken lived on the edge of town, in a house with its back to the desert.

Some people said that she lived out there because she liked her privacy, and some said that it was because she did black magic in secret. Some said that she just didn’t care for other people, and they were probably the closest to the truth.

And of course on tomatoes.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/20/the-tomato-thief-by-ursula-vernon/